Posted
by
samzenpus
on Friday October 29, 2010 @04:30PM
from the born-to-rock dept.

ByOhTek writes "CNN reports that in July, rocker Ozzy Osbourne became one of few to submit his blood to have his full genome sequenced and analyzed. The results are in, and it turns out his genome reveals some Neanderthal lineage. What does Ozzie have to say about it? 'I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years - not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why,' he wrote."

I saw Black Sabbath at the Capital Centre [wikipedia.org][1] in1973.The band came out on stage...Tony Iommi plugged in, Geezer Butler plugged in, Bill Ward ran out and dropped behind the drums*drumroll!*...Ozzy staggers out between two speaker stacks*falling twice* with a fifth/quart liquor bottle clutched in his right hand, wrestled the mic/stand into submission, and asked:"Is everybody high?"*takes large drink from bottle*"I said, is everybody high!?"Chaos ensued there af

Maybe the higher quality drug don't kill. This guy has monies he was able to buy the good stuff pure and unfornicated coke. I can only imagine someone shooting crappy stuff with bits of trash in it. Another good example is Keith Richards.

Ozzy, this isn't hard to figure out. You're alive because you're rich. You can afford a comfortable lifestyle as well as medical treatment when you need it.

Now, please stop fighting with Iommi and make another Black Sabbath album already.

MJ was allegedly killed by interaction of meds. This is a growing problem and it may indeed be the biggest killer in the USA today but it's difficult to track because hospitals don't want to admit mistakes. So no, MJ was (again, allegedly) killed because he received too much medical "care". This has been happening to celebs a lot lately, because they can afford to go get all this fancy shit prescribed to them. And it happens at least in part because FDA approval for derivatives of existing drugs is especial

Now, please stop fighting with Iommi and make another Black Sabbath album already.

I can't figure out why Iommi and Butler would even want to bother with this burnt out shell of a rock star? That last album they did with the late great Ronnie James Dio outshone anything Ozzy's done since the early 1980s. I know Ozzy (or more properly than nasty piece of work Sharon Osbourne) somehow have managed to mount some sort of litigation over the use of Black Sabbath (despite the fact that they tossed Ozzy's drunken

Other people who put shit in their bodies for decades end up on the street. Not only is Ozzy rich, his wife is also his manager, so he has a babysitter and a record label who will always make sure he's taken care of.

Do we really need to list all of the super rich musicians who have died from putting really dangerous stuff in their blood streams?

Being rich does not save you from an overdose. It might improve your odds of not ODing but it still happens to plenty of wealthy people. The ones that it doesn't happen to are lucky... or perhaps they actually have some pre-disposition to surviving heavy drug use.

It's completely logical and obvious that a druggie who is rich is more likely to survive than a druggie who is not. Ozzy's big vice, especially in the 80s, was alcohol, but unlike most alcoholics, he could afford to be one and afford the treatment to become sober.

People are apparently attaching themselves to the cute idea that Ozzy is genetically special because he survived his drug abuse. I don't know if you've seen him, but he has clearly suffered long-term effects that would hamper the lives of non-celeb

"I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years - not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive."

Is it because I'm in my 30s or because I'm a nerd or both that makes me think, "loser" when I read that?

As long as they don't have kids and are of a sound mind and can support themselves, I don't care what people do to themselves. People in general don't really seem to like it when other people deviate in ways they think are central to being a self-aware human being, as if neurocognitive mechanisms was something written into the fabric of the universe. They same thing applies to me of course, but I try to restrict myself to basic morality - because not accepting people as they are in most cases contribute to

Yeah except that with street drugs (in particular heroin and morphine analogues) you can get dramatically different doses. Shoot up an especially pure substance and you can immediately OD. No one buys a bottle of wine and dies because it's extra potent.

The same can be true of purity of stimulants. Cocaine and amphetamine overdoses can cause cardiac arrest.

Besides if you are partying like Ozzy you probably don't just use one substance at a time. Using cocaine and alcohol at the same time can be very dangerou

"No one buys a bottle of wine and dies because it's extra potent."
Na, yer rong.
Up here in Canada we got a pseudo sherry thing called (x' ) 74. Dilution 1::2 required.
All us beside the tracks winos know that 2 solid weeks of this shit will kill you.
yours, as a survivor
douglas the x'r
copyright considerations prohibit me publishing the identity of (x')

it's almost trivial to OD on caffine if you're swallowing tablets of it.but it's almost impossible to OD when drinking coffee because after 10 cups or so your hands get too shaky to hold the cup and it starts to taste like death.

similarly it is perfectly possible to drink enough neat alcohol to kill you before it knocks you out but it's almost impossible to do the same with 5% beer.not counting choking on your own vomit of course.

By the makers, yes, but at the same time cutting the drugs is part of the process once they enter the local market. The problem usually isn't high purity itself, but inconsistent cuts - perhaps the actual drug is smaller and denser than the cut, so bags made from the top of the stash are much weaker than bags made from the bottom, even though they are the same drugs from the same source. Criminalizing drugs has never been about harm reduction though, and often actively seeks to increase harm.

The studies showed that Europeans, whose ancestors lived alongside Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years, have a few percentage of Neanderthalish DNA that Africans don't have, and later some of them took off for Asia where they may have also mixed with other human species. Africans have the most genetic variation among Homo sapiens genes, because only some of them moved up to Europe, and only some of the people in Europe headed to Asia, but the people who stayed in Africa didn't get the Neanderthal b

The way I've always understood the classification is that we're Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and they were Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis, meaning they were a different subspecies, not genetically different enough to prohibit interbreeding.

The species level is intended to be roughly the level of genetic similarity where animals breed true. So if we classify them as a subspecies, our *best guess* is that we'd breed true with them.

Furthermore, this has evidently been an ongoing debate in the scientific community (I was operating from memory of college anthropology earlier, but I went and did a little poking around just now), and the school that classifies them as Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis is absolutely saying that interbreeding is possible

If Neanderthals and Humans could interbreed I'd say we both were subspecies of our common ancestor. I can't see how can they be a subspecies of us when we didn't exist yet. So either rename homo rhodesiensis to homo sapiens, or hss and hn to homo rhodesiensis sapiens and homo rhodesiensis neanderthalensis respectively.

The problem with classification is that we're basically trying to simplify a very complex system of a massive amount of variation even amongst individuals of a species into a finite set of groups. There isn't always this rather binary split between species in reality.

The problem is largely in cases like this, that species don't just diverge- through interbreeding they can converge back together again, then split, and converge and so on with varying ratios of each species involved each time which with each c

Interspecific (two different species) are very often but not always sterile. If it is indeed the case that homo sapiens contain Neanderhal DNA than either they're not really different species or they're one of the 'not often' case of interspecies cross breeding.

I'm not entirely sure why Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals wouldn't be considered subspecies of the same species rather than distinct species anyway so it's not surprising offspring aren't sterile.

If populations stay isolated long enough, they can diverge enough to no longer successfully interbreed, but populations don't always work that way, especially when there aren't major geographical forces separating them, and species boundaries aren't always that sharp. Maybe we were as separate as horses and donkeys, maybe we were only as separate as wolves and dogs, or even only as poodles and Labradors.

Look around you! So many eurasian peoples have pronounced brow ridges, deep or wide eyes, large noses, etc... There are people out there who "look" completely Neanderthal! How can you explain that if we didnt at one point cross breed?

Even the idea of good and evil can be theoretically traced to an ingrained concept of "us" and"them". All the evidence seems to point to us and them living at the same time, most likely interbreeding.

> Look around you! So many eurasian peoples have pronounced brow ridges, deep or wide eyes, large noses, etc...> There are people out there who "look" completely Neanderthal! How can you explain that if we didnt at one point cross breed?

One problem with your theory -- the Neanderthals didn't actually look "Neanderthal" (the way most people think). If anything, Neanderthal genes are probably the reason why humans of north-central European descent are more likely to be blonde and/or have blue eyes. Thin

I am not a geneticist and if I was, I am not your geneticist and this is not genetic advice. Having said that...

That 1-4% would be everyone of European and Asian descent, i.e. that small fraction of humanity that left Africa around 50K (iirc) years ago and took over the rest of the world from the previous model of human. Africans don't have Neanderthal genes, except introduced over the last hundreds of years by foreigners, making them more modern (take that, white supremacists) and further have a signific

I wouldn't want to pretend I could answer this without a cursory look around, but it doesn't appear as cut and dry as you say. First, double the calorie intake seems absurd on its face, and the figure listed on wikipedia is a more reasonable sounding 100-350 calories. Second, it doesn't sound like it's as simple as it being an ice age. Evidently they're physically well suited to the cold, but might have run into other problems with fluctuating climate. And finally, we get to the theory I had always hear

or were absorbed into human social groups. Presence of Neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans and Asians seems to lend credence to the absorption theory.

Exactly. Which way that absorption went will remain a mystery, unless we develop time travel.

If the stronger neanderthal men (men said as a general term, not a gender) captured significant numbers of cro-magnon men as slaves, farmers, or even just capturing the more attractive women to use for their own purposes, they could have

Well, they did survive, obviously. It was only crappy selective breeding over the following centuries that made the neanderthal genes less dominant. Damned the invention of agriculture and the idea of cities and civilization.

At least we know live DNA still exists, so it could be possible through selective breeding, to resurrect the species. We've theorized it could be done for woolly mammoths, why not with viable DNA. It's quite likely that there are some folks with a larger percentage

Ouch, tough crowd. Well I hate to argue over something I was meaning as a witty jibe at best..... but yes, I was aware of that, but the article implies he said it after the fact, so it's a fair extrapolation in absence of further contradiction that he sees this as an answer. It wasn't "I thought I might have something special in my DNA, but then it turned out it was Neanderthal, so I was wrong".

Sure, it's speculation, but it kinda ruins the quip to put a ton of disclaimers on it. Oh well, perils of going

True, I have a feeling that if you threw Ozzie out into the wilderness to support himself via a hunting/gathering lifestyle, he would fail miserably, emphasizing his neanderthal heritage, but maybe if you took ancient neanderthals and threw them into the heavy metal lifestyle, they would have succeeded.

Five years ago this really would have been a surprise. Maybe even more recently than that. Shit, I'll just admit it: to me, it's a surprise, today, right now. Last I heard, the DNA evidence was that nobody alive has Neanderthal lineage -- that they were an offshoot of homo sapiens ancestors rather than being homo sapiens ancestors. Just goes to show that if you're even just a few years out-of-date on anthropology, you can miss some big things. Real news is happening, right now.

Its not that hard to see why Ozzy is alive. One he can get constant medical care if need be. And two, he is rich enough to make sure that his drugs are pure. A lot of drug deaths happen not because of the drugs themselves, but because of additives in the drugs.

'I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years - not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why,' he wrote."

So, like, were the Neanderthals permanently wasted, or what? Given that Ozzie Osbourne diet, I'm surprised that we found any fossiiled remains of the Neanderthalers.

If this is true isn't this more important the Idle Slashdot or am I missing something. If he really does have Neanderthal DNA then that suggests that at one point there was a Hybrid and that hurts and helps different theories about Human Evolution like the Out of Africa theory is hurt but the Multiregional model is helped.

I don't doubt either the quantity or quality of drugs and alcohol ingested by Mr. Osbourne, however I don't see anything particularly remarkable in having "survived." Most drug and alcohol related deaths are typically either overdoses, or injuries incurred as an effect of intoxication rather than the toxicity of the substances themselves. Of all the drugs mentioned, only alcohol has been shown to reliably cause cumulative organ and tissue damage, although even then, I'm sure there are alcoholics the world

I find it quite interesting. Come to think of it I think that occasionally putting interesting articles in idle is a trap so that people have to read idle just in case there are glimpses of sanity or interesting stuff, otherwise it'd just be ignored completely by most.

'I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years - not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive.

Give me a f**king break! You're alive because you're a well-nourished 62 y/o man who has not (yet) contracted a fatal disease and has avoided fatal traumatic injury in spite of frequent intoxication. Most men in the UK and the US are still alive at 62 yrs.

CNN reports that in July, rocker Ozzy Osbourne became one of few to submit his blood to have his full genome sequenced and analyzed.

That really is great. It's so nice to see a popular icon getting involved in some way with science. Just getting his name along side genetic research goes a long way to popularize science -- after all, we know how much children and teens look up to him.

The results are in, and it turns out his genome reveals some Neanderthal lineage.

Oh Ozzy, we still love you! Ha, ha!

What does Ozzie have to say about it? 'I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years

Um, Mr. Osbourne, look--the kids--

not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine

--oh, God--

sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol

//turns pale, covers child's ears//

there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why.